Letter’s claims illustrate our current problems
To the Editor:
As I read the letter about unemployment insurance in last week’s edition of The Smoky Mountain News (“Stop the checks, get to work”), I recognized a tone that has come to dominate and pollute our civic discourse. The letter had all the elements of our current malaise. It was nasty and brutish. It was selfish and self-centered, devoid of charity. It was ignorant of fact or reason. It fed on bile and grievance, displaying both cruelty and accusation that serve less as observation than confession.
We’ve come to a place where a significant portion of the population idolizes a narcissistic con man and liar; a man whose only accomplishment and purpose is banal self-aggrandizement; a man who knows no humanity; a man who despises even his own followers treating them as marks and rubes.
What point would there be in refuting the factual errors and general misanthropy contained in the letter? There exists now a separate reality based on grudges, grievances, and conspiracy. Facts don’t matter. And so we are treated to hysterical and hyperbolic diatribes designed not to illuminate but to foster fear and division. Where is the space for civic dialogue that is so essential to our representative democracy? When one side sees life as a zero sum game, is unable to engage in civil discourse but rather revels in tossing epithets, accusation, and insults then the project that is America is on a descent to authoritarianism.
America was not conceived in perfection. Our country has always been one of aspiring, of coming into being, improving, reaching for justice and the equality of humankind. These aspirations are not well served by mythology, denial, or grasping for supremacy and privilege. A country that was meant to work for everyone works for no one except a small slice who hoard economic benefit while stoking resentment as a means of creating disunion and division among the populace.
Scripture enjoins us to love our neighbor, to stand as equals before God. My grandmother acknowledged that idea by often observing, “There but for the Grace of God go I.”, recognition of the call to humility in Micah 6:8.
The Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit asks: “What is a decent society?”
He answers: “A decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people. I distinguish between a decent society and a civilized one. A civilized society is one whose members do not humiliate one another, while a decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people.”
For 245 years we have struggled with fits and starts to create both a decent and civilized society. Diatribes like the one that appeared in these pages last week show how far we’ve strayed from our most fundamental principles and aspirations.
Mark Jamison
Whittier
